Augmenting aesthetic chills

Previous studies on aesthetic chills (i.e., psychogenic shivers) demonstrate their positive effects on stress, pleasure, and social cognition. We tested whether we could artificially enhance this emotion and its downstream effects by intervening on its somatic markers using wearable technology. We built a device generating cold and vibrotactile sensations down the spine of subjects in temporal conjunction with a chill-eliciting audiovisual stimulus, enhancing the somatosensation of cold underlying aesthetic chills. These data suggest that participants wearing the device experienced significantly more chills and chills of greater intensity. Further, these subjects were more responsive to the feelings expressed in the stimulus and felt more pleasure during the experience. Our results demonstrate that emotion prosthetics and somatosensory interfaces offer new possibilities of modulating human emotions from the bottom-up (body to mind). Interoceptive technologies offer a new paradigm for affective neuroscience, allowing controlled intervention on conscious feelings and their downstream effects on higher-order cognition.